How can you make money from your photos?

Love photography? Want to take it to the next level? Making money from your passion can seem like a bit of a pipedream, but there are loads of great ways to personalise prints to create a nice little earner. Take a look at some of our favourite ways to make money from your photos right here:

Sell prints

Sometimes, the best way really is the most obvious. How can you make money from your photos? By selling them of course! Selling prints is a great way of monetising your photos, and if you do really well, you could end up turning photography into a career. So, what do you need to do? Just set up an online shop and get to work!

The market for photo prints has never been so popular, so as long as you market your prints correctly, there’s no reason that you can’t find plenty of willing buyers for your work. Of course, you could think local. If you’ve got pics of your city or town, why not shop them around the local bars and restaurants? Plenty of places would be more than happy to part with their hard-earned cash for a gorgeous photo on a canvas print.

License through Getty Images and Flickr

If you’re an amateur photographer with a Flickr account, there’s now a really easy to make money from your photos. How? Simple, you license them through Getty Images. If anybody wants to use them for whatever reason, they can pay a small fee, earning you cash in the process. The whole thing is super easy to set up – you just turn on the ‘Request to Access’ link on your page – and Getty will review your work.

If they like what they see (and why wouldn’t they!), they’ll help you set up all the boring legal stuff like permissions and pricing. Best of all, you don’t really have to do anything to make money through Getty. It’s a passive income stream, putting money in your pocket as you go about your daily business.

Exhibit

If you’re really confident in your photography skills, it might be time to take the next step up and display and sell them in an exhibition. Why not start by building up an online portfolio of your very best photos? You can find a following on Instagram or Twitter, or by submitting your pics to web-based competitions. Once you’ve got enough of a following to make an exhibition worthwhile, it’s time to set up the show!

Find a decent (and affordable) venue that’s easily accessible, spread the word with flyers and social media, set up all the logistics and make sure you’ve got lots to say about your work – people are going to want to talk to you, after all. Hopefully, your photos will be a big enough hit to convince lots of people to crack open their wallets!

Submit them to stock photography sites

Stock photography sites are pretty similar to the Getty/Flickr route we discussed earlier, although there are a couple of crucial differences between them. There are loads of different stock image sites, from ShutterStock to iStock, that you can submit your images to. Be sure to add lots of keywords so that people are able to find them, and bear in mind that making money from stock photographs tends to be a numbers game. If you want to make serious bank, you’ll probably have to take lots of photos. But hey, you’re a photo whizz, right? Shouldn’t be too hard!

Go freelance

If you really want to transform your talent for photography into a career, getting into freelance photography might be your best bet. Find a niche and make sure you’re well known for it. Whether it’s food photography or images of sporting events, this is the best way to build a following and a client base.

Becoming a freelance photographer can be difficult due to the stiff competition so you’ll need to ensure that your work stands out. Consider only offering a certain product or printing style, serene city landscapes on square canvas for example.

Get people to spread the word that you’re available and slowly but surely the offers will start coming in! Want to kick-start things, why not sign up to a freelancing website and advertise your services?

Follow these tips, and you’ll be making money from your photos in absolutely no time. Who knows, maybe you’re the next Man Ray!